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Poetry Chronicle

STARTLE RESPONSE. By Heather Fuller. (O Books, paper, $12.) There are as many good poetry books being written as ever, but goodness gets wearisome. Fuller's third book is a relief from this, lacking the steady-handed competence, ingratiating charm and middle-aged melancholia from which much verse suffers. Despite a table of contents promising careful, cubic order -- three sections of nine parts (less one at the end) -- "Startle Response" is uneven, unfamiliar and charged with intensity. It wants to be new speech: "G says jargon is like J's new language / like prisoners invent a code in other words" a poem called "Comic" begins, encoding the desires that come when regular speech feels anesthetic. This quest to rescue real experience by telling it in other words is central to poetry, and erotically charged in its urge for raw experience. This can be unsettling. Over and over we're asked to steady ourselves, to recalibrate how that line got us to this one: "when you sleep you miss / the courtesy service dream," Fuller writes in "Notes on the Tarmac," tracking something about mobility and modernity. Prufrock's cheap retreats return as the future's anonymous motels in which the personal is the perishable. Just then, one decides "dream" is an imperative commanding what follows, "the trouble of the ones / who'd slept there but / that is now your trouble." Endlessly displacing one another in featureless rooms, we have to share nightmares, the language and displacement itself. One is always trying to catch one's balance, as if startled, as one often is amid this jagged and terrific book.

Joshua Clover

AMERICAN SUBLIME: Poems. By Elizabeth Alexander. (Graywolf, paper, $14.) A birthday sweater of a book: substantial, thoughtful, practical, dull. Alexander's concerns are the fine lines between the personal and political, the private and public, the past and present, and she explores them with relentless levelheadedness. Even the collection's arrangement is carefully balanced: it begins with a section of poems mostly about family, friends and fellow writers, culminates with a sequence addressing the 1839 Amistad rebellion and pivots on a center section focused on aesthetics. The poems of the first group are smartly observed and sometimes beguilingly rhythmic, but often ponderous, as in "Ode," which begins with a genial description of a group of mothers on a beach ("thigh flesh shirred as gentle wind shirrs a pond"), but ends with an awkward stab at profundity: "This is who we are, no, This is what / we have done and continue to do. / We labor in love. We do it. We mother." The Amistad sequence stumbles under its burdens of diligent facticity, unconvincing dramatic monologues and stilted rhetorical gestures. (When the captured mutineers are let out of their cells to exercise before a gawking crowd, Alexander writes, "The Africans do not smile," as if avoiding the contraction will imbue the facile image with solemnity.) The best moments are those in which present and past collide, sending off welcome sparks. In one poem, Alexander imagines finding Ralph Ellison's TV antenna in her flower bed ("It picks up mysterious whispers"), and in another the sight of "a black man . . . nodding and smiling / with both hands visible, mouthing / 'Yes, Officer,' " sets off a rapid chain of associations, from the poet's father teaching her "the words 'cooperate,' 'officer,' " to "the whisper that separates / obsequious from safe" to "Armstrong, / Johnson, Robinson, Mays." This is Alexander's greatest gift: her ability to demonstrate, too dutifully but still convincingly, Faulkner's claim that "the past is never dead. It's not even past."

Joel Brouwer

THE LIFE OF A HUNTER: Poems. By Michelle Robinson. (University of Iowa, paper, $16.) Jargon is one neighborhood's language used in another; poems have the grace to be downtown, where kinds of speech clang against each other. In that regard, "The Life of a Hunter" is very much a city book. Robinson likes equally the sounds of heightened diction and urban noir: "How can I describe to you the sadness of my precision?" one poem asks, and not three lines later, "We threw down right / there, behind a Mexican grocery store." This yoking seems made for the street scenes and wandering monologues that fill the book's cityscape; it brings tension to love poems as well. One begins, "The things that are false clamor and accost us," sounding like Augustine or Marcus Aurelius; soon enough, the narrator's panting "oh jesus her kleptomania! Those legs legs legs etc!" Well, love's a mixed bag. That stolen heart, those exclamation points; are they on loan from the 50's, or here from sheer elation? Elsewhere, the book seems anxious about its tactics: "everything I say is a trembling non sequitur," Robinson writes, apologetically, in "Pepper." But the previous line has incidentally described things better, "not unlike an intermission from madness, greasy and sublime." The book concerns what unalikes -- people, situations, tongues -- might have to say to one other. The distances and disparities, implausibly, hold it together.

J.C.

WISE FISH. Tales in 6/8 Time: Poems. By Adrian Castro. (Coffee House, paper, $14.) Castro, a native Miamian of Cuban and Dominican descent and a practicing priest of the Yoruban religion, writes poems about the Caribbean melting pot in sinuous and syncopated lines peppered with Spanish, Creole and West African phrases. The fish of the title have grown wise because they have witnessed so much history passing above them: migrations, invasions and abductions; refugees, conquerors and traders. Castro, too, seems to have mastered the region's complex history, and he moves through his material with fluidity and grace, equally authoritative whether he's writing about conquistadors "talcumed with salt & sea breeze / old gunpowder . . . Moorish cumin" or contemporary Miami, "where the conspiracy of languages bounces off heads like radio / signals." The images are rarely this specific; usually Castro reaches for archetypal emblems -- sand, ocean, moon, sun -- in his effort to create a synthetic mythology for all the peoples that have crisscrossed the Caribbean, often in desperation or captivity. The most ambitious poem, "Misa Caribeña," imagines a future where integrations of languages, nations, religions and races are transformed from sources of conflict to means of survival: "because we mix we survive reborn / Misa porque tú con yo yo con tú / todos mezclados -- / Misa caribeña." These poems are not dry history lessons; they also make music. Castro has given live recitals with accompanying traditional drums, and even a cursory glance suggests his poems -- which seem to be trying to dance their way off the page as they move through whiplash enjambments and elastic line lengths, leaping over white space and letting out occasional ecstatic yelps ("ay dios! / (ay dios!) / ((aaayyy!))") -- would truly come alive on the stage. "Wise Fish" is a serious and seriously enjoyable contribution to our flourishing Latino literature.

MIDWEST ECLOGUE: Poems. By David Baker. (Norton, $23.95.) Poetry often stands accused of being prose laid out funny. Baker's newish formalism is prose laid out like traditional poetry, and shoehorned into a simulacrum of taut meter to go with slack language. At his best, Baker finds a spare descriptive mode; "October Storm" gets incisively at the ragged clarity found in chaotic crisis. More often, he offers a compendium of trends in quality verse these days: here's the science poem, as it relates to our inner lives; here's the alchemy poem, ditto. There's even a piece for the 19th-century poet John Clare, Joseph Cornell's replacement as the artist with enough cognoscenti appeal to launch a thousand poems. In "Bedlam," Baker does his own language no favors by quoting the broken and astonishing Clare at length. The hard-to-swallow analogy between himself and Clare leads shortly to a position that can only be called compassionate condescension: "It kills me to think what a decent pill / might have meant to the man." If only all poetic problems were as tractable.

THIRTY YEARS WAR: Love Poems. By Patricia Ferrell. (Zoo Press, paper, $14.95.) "Ardent one moment, indifferent the next," one of Ferrell's poems begins. That's an apt if unintentional summary of this collection's merits and flaws. Many of the poems are vigorous, tough-minded reports -- conveyed in crisp lines and tightly controlled stanzas -- on the ancient, unending battle between the sexes. (The words "war" and "love" in the book's title are interchangeable; "thirty years" seems to refer to the length of the author's tour of duty on love's front lines.) In "Refugee," the speaker is displaced by an emotional skirmish in her own rooms: "Sometimes this mound of anger is the only / Earth there is to stand on. One morning / I woke up filled with words because / I was filled with you / And I did not know which was better. To live always / This way would be a misery of such tragic beauty, / Like being shot every day upon / The smile of waking." This is steely and convincing stuff, but elsewhere, Ferrell undercuts her authority by lapsing into a strangely self-conscious glibness, as if, suddenly embarrassed (or frightened?) by the gravity of her ideas, she wants to cloak them with frivolity. The snarky "Dreams of Academe" takes accurate but hackneyed potshots at poet-professors; "Pet-Witnessed Crimes" is a soppy-stern bit of bathos spoken by a dog; and "City Sparrow" is so fey and sentimental ("It was so brave and small . . . just a dot / On the black expanse of summer asphalt") that I can only believe it's meant to be comic. The cumulative impression is of repeated masterly gestures toward seriousness thwarted by a coy reluctance to settle down. Ferrell might be alluding to this conflict in "The Friend-Boat," where she says of "the honest me," "I will never go to it, but / I feel it is my closest friend." I'm not sure why Ferrell lays claim to such a categorical rejection of honesty, since her work is most effective when it's most candid: "I have a human voice, / It is flawed."

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QUIPU. By Arthur Sze. (Copper Canyon, paper, $15.) Sze turns often to what was once called "natural philosophy" -- particularly astrophysics and botany -- to detail worlds for his all-too-human actors. He's not alone. But if a common, unstated goal is to borrow a scientific rigor against poetry's reputation for riot, Sze need not worry. In his eighth book, his lines and logic are thoughtful and sere as ever; few current lyricists so little need to outsource structural soundness. A classically elegant Sze line from the long title poem runs, "Who can unravel the spin of an elegy and counterspin it into an ode?" But not all is subatomic metaphor, and much hangs on the sensual; striding an open New Mexico landscape, "Quipu" can be a pretty sexy book. The second poem moves swiftly from rice paper and beeswax to hair, nipples and toes. Sometimes this urgency is explicit ("He leaves teeth marks / on her neck; she groans and shows the whites / of her eyes"); sometimes it's immanent, as when "Earthshine" ends "it all goes and comes at once." Still, Sze's bone-dry attention sharpens itself often on less pleasant meditations: "Thoughts inch through / memory," he reflects in "Aqueous Gold," "the way maggots inch through a cèpe." If the simile structure feels old-fashioned, like several of this book's themes (the calm truth of the natural world; the awful and delightful debacles of the flesh; the effort to reconcile these things), "Quipu" is a reminder of how familiarity might not breed contempt but elegant care.

J.C.

LAMPBLACK & ASH. By Simone Muench. (Sarabande, cloth, $20.95; paper, $13.95.) Many poets have developed aesthetic crushes on the French surrealist Robert Desnos; his reputation as the dreamiest of the dreamers in André Breton's circle, his enthralling poems and his death in the Nazi camp at Terezin make him a fascinating figure. Muench has fallen for Desnos harder than most, yet despite her poetry's acknowledged debt to his early work, it does not feel derivative. Muench tends to begin a poem with a vague suggestion of setting or theme, and then piles on gorgeous phrases: "In second-story windows, / girls in fine coal dresses undress, scrim of their slips / lemon light: thin as a bone-button that unfastens / the sky." Muench's lush figures give great pleasure to both ear and eye, and her imaginative leaps can feel both mysterious and inevitable, in a way that recalls not only Desnos, but also Neruda. The danger is that such sensory smorgasbords can seem self-indulgent. Carol Muske-Dukes, in her introduction, writes of "Muench's refusal to pursue the image for its own sake," but in fact many of the poems here do exactly that. "The OED Defines Red-Hot" is a joyous riff on the color red ("Cerise / streak across her cheeks. Blood -- / blistered. Auburn hair. She lingers / in the arbor beneath mimosa trees, / sipping Madeira") but seems to have no larger reason to exist, no overarching structure, no real development. The poem could be twice as long or half as long -- you could probably even read it backward -- and its effect would be the same. If Muench can rein in her extravagant language rather than allow it to run away with her, the results might be even more spectacular.

J.B.

COMPANY OF MOTHS. By Michael Palmer. (New Directions, paper, $16.95.) It has been suggested that Palmer, a magnificent San Francisco poet, is the best French poet currently working in English. This is perhaps the most generous thing said about France of late, but it falls short of describing Palmer's astringent blend of surrealism and symbolism, and his prodigious grasp of Western intellectual traditions. He's got a lot of éclat. Inevitably, he gets taken for an aesthete. This isn't much of a complaint, given Mallarmé's reminder that "Everything can be summed up in Aesthetics and Political Economy," and the fact that nobody wants a versifying Karl Marx (Louis Zukofsky excepted). Palmer's drifting, moonlit zone (hence all the moths) is absolutely specific as it is dreamily unfamiliar; it pushes up against reality even as it recedes to reveal itself as an artful contrivance. "The red vowels, how they spill / then spell a sea of red," begins one such dialectical fairy scene, a poem called "The." The images tempt recognition, "the bridge's threads / against flame-scarred hills," before remembering the view is made of ink "And us outside / by other worlds." France it ain't; poems seem to come from a country to be named later, where time is out of joint, "the Future-Past" creeps unceasingly into the present and the countryside is bedecked with mysterious signage: "Streets of the Poor Text," "The Paper House," "The Imam's Delight" and skywriters scrawling "Rats Rule!" What's it like to live in a world of mysterious signs? That is the question -- for daily life as much as poetry -- to which these poems are a kind of answer.

J.C.

HERE, BULLET. By Brian Turner. (Alice James, paper, $14.95.) The day of the first moonwalk, my father's college literature professor told his class, "Someday they'll send a poet, and we'll find out what it's really like." Turner has sent back a dispatch from a place arguably more incomprehensible than the moon -- the war in Iraq -- and deserves our thanks for delivering in these earnest and proficient poems the kinds of observations we would never find in a Pentagon press release. Turner served from 2003 to 2004 with the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division. His poems about his tour of duty have a hurried quality, as if they had been drafted not back home in tranquil recollection but on the ground, in spare moments between patrols. As a result, his lines can have a terrific immediacy. A poem called "2000 lbs.," more than 100 lines long, describes a suicide bomber's attack in a crowded square in Mosul in meticulous detail, from a taxi driver's memories of first love to bridal shop mannequins torn to shreds to a civil affairs officer who one moment is blowing soap bubbles out his Humvee's window -- "something for the children, something beautiful, / translucent globes with their iridescent skins / drifting on vehicle exhaust and the breeze" -- and the next is staring at the bloody "absurd stumps" from which his hands have vanished. Turner's sentences are sometimes less keen than his observations. Some poems here feel too dashed off, as if literally transcribed from a journal. But Turner's most consistent mode is one of brisk, precise -- and nonpartisan -- attention to both the terrors and the beauty he found among Iraq's ruins. In these poems, Iraq emerges from the fog of political oratory into tangibility, becoming a place of "artillery shells / sewn into the carcasses of dead farm animals," but also a place where "Thistleweed bursts open in purple / while honeybees drone and hover."

J.B.

Joshua Clover's most recent book is "The Matrix"; his next collection of poems, "The Totality for Kids," will be published next year. Joel Brouwer is the author of two books of poems, "Exactly What Happened" and "Centuries." He teaches at the University of Alabama.